The Singapore Oceanarium is an engineering marvel. It holds 45 million litres of water (18 Olympic pools) across 22 displays. It also has a 36-metre by nine-metre glass window through which you can see sharks, stingrays and other large fish in the open ocean.

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It is part of Resorts World Sentosa, a site in Sentosa - an island off the southern end of Singapore island - full of entertainment places that has a total revenue of about $800 million a year.

It does a valuable job in exposing people, especially the young, to the marvels of the undersea world, housing 100,000 creatures. Alas, many of the species are endangered. It supports a range of conservation projects, especially propagating invertebrates.

Meanwhile, above water, a short way away in the Singapore Strait, you can see hundreds of oil tankers that bring crude oil from the Middle East and take refined oil products to the rest of the world, particularly to Australia.

It is a weird slice of the global economy. In one small area we see an organisation that sees value in presenting the natural world to people and in conservation, and just across the way we see the vehicles of the destruction of those very ecosystems.

In one slice of the economy there are people being paid to engage in the conservation of biodiversity and close by in another, people are being paid to move fossil fuels to places where they will be burned to add to the carbon in the atmosphere that may well result in the extinction of us all.

Our imaginations find it hard to cope with that contradiction, and so does our economics. It made me recall a lecture given earlier this year by Andrew Leigh, the Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury, on the "Economics of Human Extinction".

Leigh argues that traditional economics, grounded in policy responses based on cost-benefit analysis, has no way of dealing with the prospect of human extinction.

Economics is good at assessing costs against benefits or detriments. Investors can work........

© Canberra Times